Bob's Blog

We used to make it with iodine crystals and household ammonia.

Peanut butter glass jar partially filled with stinkum ammonius.

Mr Coffee filter thoroughly wet with the stinkum and will about 1 to 2 inches of stinkum above the bottom of the filter.

Pour Iodine crystals into the stinkum above the filter.

Punch holes in top of glass.

Let evaporate.

As long as the crystals that formed were wet with stinky water, nothing happens.

Let dry - the vibrations from a flys wings hovering over a tad on a puddle of glycerin would pass the remains of the fly into another dimension.

More fun was to pack the wet stuff into a lock with a tooth pick. Hypersonic car keys.

Son, the only thing money can't buy is poverty.

07/08/2007

> >When I was in SF, Ca awhile ago I spent some time just watching the
> >shipping come and go, and was taking pictures.  One thing I noted, was
> >that the ships leaving the Golden Gate were noticeably less filled
> >than those entering.  There would be about half the visible cans on
> >ship.

In the middle fifties the railroads went full force on shipping containers around. By the mid sixties, it was possible to unload a container ship on the west coast, move the containers by rail to the east coast and ship them to europe CHEAPER ( using highly "overpaid" American labor no less ) than it was to ship them either thru the panama canal or the other way. Plus it was at least 10 days faster to New Orleans, much less new york.

( This was developed by major american capitalist to increase their profits radically by destroying a shipping industry dominated by foreign firms. Do not get me started on how the American government destroyed the viability of the shipping industry by rules and regulations etc imposed only on American registry vessels - and passed on regulating or restricting entry to foreign vessels that did not have to even look at these regulations. Don't even try to figure out why there as so few american flag vessels. During WWII the merchant marine and American ships outnumbered the entire rest of the world fleets combined and were so at the end of the war. And they were "modern" most built during the war. Then the enviro whackoos etc piled on the shipping companies, plus the massive taxation of shipbuilding in this country and shipping and of course, the unions went into high gear stealing merchandize faster than it could be brought in. Yep, the US deliberately destroyed its merchant marine for the good of the "world" )

By the late sixties, no new tanker could travel the Panama Canal, nor could the new generations of freighters. By Jimmy Carter virtually no major shipper could use the canal. It was only naval vessels, small freighters and cruise ships.

So, in a brilliant move engineered by someone not associated with the Carter Fiasco, we "returned" the canal to Panama and it became theirs. Of course, we retained the right for infinitely to use the canal without cost for our naval vessels, and we retained the right to keep and maintain bases for our forces to protect the canal, and the right to keep certain "unfriendly" nations from using the canal, and the right to inspect and embargo cargo in the case of war yada yada yada. In actuality, we got everything defense would need absolutely free and they got to work, maintain, and collect some fees from the canal.

Which started every idiot child bleating and whining and crying and moaning about we "gave" away a fast approaching useless nightmare to Panama without the appropriate whatever.

Right now, in the Alameda Corridor, running just a block from the store, dozens of container ship loads a day leave for parts east and Europe. The tracks are 4 across with 240 or more trains a day passing, and when the corridor is complete from san pedro to san bernidino, it will be a minimum of 4 wide and 500 trains a day. In 2007?, the railroads will drive a bulldozer thru all crossovers in the corridor and there will be no grade crossing period. Which means no more horns. Cities have been warned that if they choose to cross the tracks, its build an overpass or underpass on your nickel before that fast approaching date.

Troubled crossing or areas of political bs are being bulldozed out of existence early if you complain to the press or railroads loud enough.

Keep in mind that traffic does not have to equal on a "bridge" between asia, the us, europe and south america.

07/11/07

> >Another reason for the US to charge money and scramble the GPS system 
> >we US taxpayers maintain for the world's free use. I don't see why we 
> >do this "for free". Providing the guideposts for enemy states and 
> >terrorist so they can aim at us better is, um, stupid. And we risk this 
> >so guys with 9C1's can see how fast their Crapices can go? Or people 
> >can chase treasure boxes in public parks? Or some fatcat's yacht has a 
> >back-up to LORAN? Who cares. Pull the plug on GPS or charge a user fee 
> >for it (make it pay for itself), and make it available to friendly 
> >states/customers only. If there any public free use left for it, then 
> >degrade it for half-mile accuracy. That's enough to get a yacht to 
> >harbor. 

Then of course, since ALL local navigation systems were replaced by GPS, the Coast Guard logically should replace the f*cked up system will similar stuff - including thousands of manned light houses, radar repeaters, short range navigation systems that function in the fog etc. Another bunch of billions of dollars. Just to bring back what GPS replaced.

Then, of course, for air navigation, back to thousands of localizer stations, and every airport will again need localizer to line up the runways. And of course, we will go back to much higher vfr rules and need maybe a doubling of ground control and approach people. Again, just to bring back what GPS replaced.

GPS was designed and built for the American peoples' intense COMMERCIAL navigation needs and the only reason YOU get to use it is because the units got cheap and easy.

You want to make it unusable for COMMERCIAL purpose, you had better have a half a trillion dollars or so that you are required by custom and law to provide navigation aids to the public - who bought and paid for GPS without any silly arsed military whoop de doos in mind.

Terrain following missiles predate GPS. Inertial guidance - particularly the laser ones work extremely well without GPS and are cheap. Then there is radio and tv homing and a dozen other schemes.

The point is - if you screwed the american COMMERCIAL navigation out of existence and made it the private toy of some dunderheaded generals - you would make absolutely zero impact on anyone who wanted to target anything within the US. None Zippo Nada. There are far too many ways to target anything - and if its in a free society, where you can walk up to it, you could even have a suicide bomber R/C the missile into himself or the target.

If you think the billions was spent on a military toy that took 15 years to get into place, most of which was done during Democrat administrations, you just might want to find out what GPS really is used for and what was replaced by it to meet legal and moral US government commitments.

Try navigating a barge down the Mississippi with virtually all the former navigation aids long destroyed and your version of only a half mile yacht club accuracy. Particularly if its ammonium nitrate fertilizer - say 2 or 3 million pounds. Want to be into the town it has to twist thru in the normal foggy mornings?

One of the few good things Teddy Kennedy ever did was to order the military to get rid of its screw-the-pooch capacity in the US. He knew then and anyone who thinks it through today, that the alternative costs hundreds of times what GPS costs - and that any thoughts of national security by screwing-the-pooch GPS modes could be so easily averted by other means its not even worth doing here.

Course, that's only the opinion of a former aerospace software engineer whose only done a few non gps guidance systems.

Shows how to wire two HC-11's together in a master slave processor setup.

Say two 730 for double the I/O. Just thinking about it. A little bit.

Robotic motor controllers.

Thermal arm controls.

In fact, a whole bunch of really neat stuff for controlling things. In small cheap packages.

Like up to 26 RC channels, 16 channels of 12 bit ADC and a grunch of other control stuff.

Add in USB and CAN bus boards. Embedded Internet Boards etc.

Naw - nothing of interest in Robotics.

Understand that it had less than 30 minutes to get from Montclair rolling back grade and downward from 1000+ elevation to sea level. Several attempts were made to stop it - but time ran out and the railroad elected to derail it in the commerce rail yard before it went further into the city and probably would have JUMPED the tracks.

Not the best of choice, but with disaster growing every second, the only choice.

Now the stupid arsed mayor and every other lawyer are screaming for criminal charges against the rail crew and railroad, mega bucks for damages and gleefully throwing blame around.

"Your crystal ball SHOULD HAVE told you that it would have to be derailed. You didn't give us notice. Send everyone to Jail and empty your wallet."

As if telling the idiots that living near tracks that have SECONDS to get off their druggy buns and run like hell away from the tracks would have down any good.

It started with a intense dislike of "seven segment" digital tachometers and speedometers and has deteriated into a distrust and dislike of anything electric. Course, years of doing Safety of Flight software design may have had some influence.

One of the advantages of early mechanical gauges is rotating them so that the dial indicator is always at 12 o'clock high at normal. Then, a glance about the dash only distracts if something is wrong. Aircraft and racers have used that for many years pre-rice.

Yes, you can do the same with electric, but, somehow, after 50 years of bad experience with them, I just never seem to be able to trust them.

Michael Moore is a paradox. A millionaire who boasts of wealth as proving his value -- "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?"

He lives in a million-dollar apartment, and boasts of that as well. "I walk among them. I live on the island of Manhattan, a three-mile-wide strip of land that is luxury home and corporate suite to America's elite..... Those who run your life live in my neighborhood. I walk in the streets with them each day" (Michael Moore, Stupid White Men, p. 51).

He sends his child to a private school -- no sense associating with the working class -- and has some trouble associating with them himself. The New York Post reported on a tantrum he threw in London: "Then, on his second-to-last night, [Michael Moore] raged against everyone connected with the Roundhouse and complained that he was being paid a measly $750 a night. 'He completely lost the plot,' a member of the stage crew told the London Evening Standard. 'He stormed around all day screaming at everyone, even the 5 pound-an-hour bar staff, telling them how we were all con men and useless. Then he went on stage and did it in public.' At his last appearance, staffers refused to work or even open the theater's doors." NY Post, Jan. 8, 2003.

He supplements his meager income with speaking tours (No more $750 gigs; he charged Cornell students $10,000, , Univ. of Texas ones $25,000, told the Penn State ones he could be had for a modest $15-20,000 a night, and most recently, when Kansas University students asked for him, "Moore -- a noted political activist and Academy Award-winning filmmaker -- had raised eyebrows by asking for more than $30,000 to speak at KU." Ah, the joys of capitalism....) No wonder one former associate of his rated him as " You would think that he's the ultimate common man. But he's money-obsessed."

And...

His major themes are his status as the spokesman of the working class, the vices and corruptions of the money-obsessed, and the evils of the United States.

It would be easy to denounce Moore as a hypocrite. Many conservatives denounce him as a leftist, when in fact the serious left, the thinking left, generally finds him appalling. He is, in short, the latest in the modern breed of Limosine Leftists -- individuals who, while personally they share the values of 19th century robber barons, find it flattering to adopt a thin (and personally meaningless) veneer of leftism as a pose, in the same manner they pick a flattering hair style or gown. (A left-leaning critic of Moore summed up the situation very nicely: Moore's appeal lies in his giving wealthy, over-educated, whites an opportunity to laugh at working-class whites.)

07/22:

God I so love unions. But noooooooooooooooooo. That was not goooooooooooooooooooood enough for the warehouse and boxing workers and janitors, they wanted to make as much if not more than the technical employees, and to be allowed to work on special unit teams like winter support, fire emergency etc. After all, just because they were stupid, lazy and shiftless had nothing to do with it. I got fire premium pay for going INTO fires - and they wanted the opportunity to do the same - even though they had no training or experience and would have been a disaster for those who actually did get deep into burning chemical structures. Not only did they think they should get the bonus's, they thought they had the right to risk my life and all other fire teams lives to get more money.

Well, at one point, they decided to try to form a union to get them their rights. They held information pickets, and started calling the rest of us scabs etc and started trashing our cars. Remember, all of us were permanent employees of the company and many had been for years - but we are all scum because most of us saw no reason to unionize with the trash collectors and labors to improve their lives and force me to give it up for solidarity.

They got a bunch of cars in the winter including mine. We "solved" the problem the next day. There was a bunch of us showed up the next with baseball bats and beat the crapue out of the picketers. Beat them down into the dirt, kicked them while they were down and tried to bat their heads into the next county. None died, but we didn't care, and all were hauled off to a hospital. Beat them down bad - which 30+years ago was ordinary union politics.

Nothing was ever said to us. Yepper, I was real close and brotherly to the janitors and warehouse works and some clerks. Yeah right.

A few weeks later, the plant operators and maintenance where called into small meeting and asked if we would have a problem with firing all the janitors, clerks and warehouse workers, and replacing them with a contract service.

Nahhh - who gave a crap about them anyway,

Two weeks later they were all gone and Western Labor showed up under contract to do the crap work. All wanna be union people all gone. Nobody missed them.

Of course, by now, the sharp smart company officials that knew by a tad more money and consideration, you had dedicated hard working employees doing there best to make the company successful, these officials probably got replaced by lawyers and bean counters and MBA's who turned it into just a crappy job.

07/24/07:

What a POS company...

07/29/07:

Try ordering a book - they still need year make and model - even if the book is, say, a Chilton's Repair Manual.

I have been asked for Year Make and Model even on tool purchases.

The only rational conclusion is that the people are not capable of dealing with the parts system without it - either by stupid programming or stupid employees or both.

To cap it off, not only are the store hours different in different locations, the prices are substantially different between the stores in Montclair and Fontana!

08/01/07:

Highways and the post-office were part of the constitution and founding fathers beliefs that they were needed. The ability to travel anywhere quickly by horse and now car was essential to the concept of a participatory republic.

Now, we have those that wish to dominate trying their very best to "tax" or control the means of transportation in the name of some phoney god of conservatism. Once its taxable or fee-able, then the government can control it and then determine that it is a luxury that only the privileged may have.

But that's only me wanting a single government for everything and part of stating that once the 17th amendment was passed, the states lost much of there power and the 16th killing almost all of the enforcement or need of a state.

Want to advocate "states rights"? Advocate eliminating the Williams Jennings Bryant Amendments to the constitution completely. And DO NOT REPLACE THEM with something new and hokey. Those gone, a state has regained a right to its existence. Those in place? Why bother. But that's me.

08/02/07:

A. .458 Win Mag Pistol: Action SSP-91 Cannon Breach type (later bought by magnum research. Barrel - 1" Douglas Match Grade Bull barrel 16" long, fitted at end with KDF. Looks like a T-Handle with the action behind the hand. Red Dot sight. Ace in hole - 6 Rocket Ports angled to hold muzzle down and pull barrel forward. Yes Rocket Ports - designed by Willy Shuman - Atlas Powder Company Rocket Nozzle Engineer. Seen the funky ports on top of certain expensive race guns. Same guy - I probably have misspelled his name.

B. When Magnum took it over, they had heard about it, and brought out their own version. They sold some - broke some wrists and promptly stopped before the lawsuits could kill them - no secret ports - we have exclusive right on ridiculous handguns.

C. Remember the "I put my huevos in a wheel barrel and shoot the worlds largest handgun (this issue) mania about 1990. We built this toy, tested it, wrote every one of those assholes and said - this is it - Shoot It or Shut Up. No Takers. Took it out to every gunshow in socal for a year. No writer takers. Many have shot it - but not one fucking writer.

D. Shooting it is like catching a major league baseball bat that stops in about a half inch. That's with a 500 grain pushed by 70 grains of 3031. Drop down to a 400 grain and its not as bad as a 44 magnum. These are FULL UP .458 Win Mag loads not wimped out stuff. 500 grain about 1600 FPS, 400 grain about 2100 FPS + from a PISTOL!!!!

E. To shoot this, you must love Psyche Warfare. I go to outdoor range, take my stall. Put earplugs in, then muffs. Put glasses on, then Ski Goggle safeties, put cotton up nose, packmyr gloves on. Then take out .25 berretta. Plink out a few clips - ignored as wimpish asshole. Slip baby out of her rug, drop a Nike missile down her throat, Take Aim, relax and pull the pin.

F. 70 Grains of 3031 detonates. Before the recoil pulls the sight off, the 500 grain slug smacks the manhole cover 120 yards down range. Know how shocking a supersonic boom is leaving a pistol?

G. 6 foot ball of orange fire out muzzle, and 4 foot jets of flame out of Rocket Ports. Teeth hurt. Even with cotton up your nose, the muzzle blast is sharp. Muffs get re-arranged, and eyeballs hurt from glasses smack. Feels like kicked in chest.

H. KDF and Rocket parts double the pleasure for the guy left and right. Usually lose muffs and glasses.

I. EVERYONE has incurable flinch every time I pick up anything for the rest of the day. Forget to mention tin roof lifts off rafters and drops paint chips all along. Love to take it out.

08/14/07:

US Patent 6,003,305

"Method of reducing internal combustion engine emissions, and system for same"

Look it up. Uses morphine "pain killer" as the base for a number of oxides of nitrogen reducers.